Adam Laurie

Designation: Director at Aperture Labs Ltd

About Adam:

Adam Laurie is a security consultant working the in the field of electronic communications, and a Director of Aperture Labs Ltd. (aperturelabs.com)
who specialise in reverse engineering of secure embedded systems. He started in the computer industry in the late Seventies, working as a computer programmer on PDP-8 and other mini computers, and then on various Unix, Dos and CP/M based micro computers as they emerged in the Eighties. He quickly became interested in the underlying network and data protocols, and moved his attention to those areas and away from programming, starting a data conversion company which rapidly grew to become Europe's largest specialist in that field (A.L. Downloading Services). During this period, he successfully disproved the industry lie that music CDs could not be read by computers, and wrote the world's first CD ripper, 'CDGRAB'. At this point, he became interested in the newly emerging concept of 'The Internet', and was involved in various early open source projects, the most well known of which is probably 'Apache-SSL', which went on to become the de-facto standard secure web server. Since the late Nineties he has focused his attention on security, and has been the author of various papers exposing flaws in Internet services and/or software, as well as pioneering the concept of re-using military data centres housed in underground nuclear bunkers as secure hosting facilities.

Adam aka "Major Malfunction" has been a senior member of staff at DEFCON since 1997 and is the POC for the London DEFCON chapter DC4420. Over the years has given presentations on forensics, magnetic stripe, EMV, InfraRed, RF, RFID, Terrestrial and Satellite TV hacking, and, of course, Magic Moonbeams. He is the author and maintainer of the open source python RFID exploration library 'RFIDIOt', which can be found at (aperturelabs.com)